Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/57



was already in London.

Letters made slow progress and he had probably seized on a sudden chance to sail before Benzelius's letter arrived. Emanuel could scarcely have had a more adventurous journey. First the ship was caught in a fog and nearly grounded on a sand bank, then it was boarded by a French privateer, then it got a broadside from an English warship in pursuit of the privateer, and finally, in the Thames near London, some Swedish friends persuaded young Swedberg to break quarantine and sail with them to town.

But as the English authorities knew that the plague had broken out in Sweden they were morose about Emanuel's impatience, in fact they threatened to hang him, this being the legal penalty. He did escape, with a severe warning, but it must have sunk deep into him that a "health certificate" was a serious thing, for those words were to turn up again in his life's most intense spiritual crisis, puzzling even himself.

For the present a spiritual crisis was far from the handsome youth of twenty-two, independent of family control for the first time in his life, and alone, except for a few Swedish friends, in the world's greatest city.

He had come from the little cathedral town of Upsala, inhabitants about five thousand, to London, whose half million brawled and stank over fifteen square miles. All continentals noticed the smells of London.1 There was indeed a less infected district in the West End, as John Gay had said in his Trivia,2 "Bear me to the paths of fair Pell Mell, Safe are thy pavements, Grateful is thy smell," the London of face-masks, brocaded hoop-skirts, gold-laced uniforms, Ranelagh and Vauxhall, litters, footmen, linkboys, but the young Swede probably had only an outsider's glimpse of these splendors.

He was not in a position to get much else, however good his academic introductions, since his father had given him a sum